In trying to avert dangerous climate change, governments are aiming for something extraordinary. They want to transform the global economy because of a hypothesis for which the evidence is mostly inaccessible to the layman.

It is the biggest pre-emption in history, and it relies on collective trust in science.

That is why recent controversies around misreported evidence and exclusion of dissent at the University of East Anglia and the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change are so important.

The worst allegations relate to the suppression of information – deleting emails, ignoring inconvenient data – in order to make aspects of the case for climate change tidier.

The cover-up is the most toxic part in any scandal. The broad outline of the scientific case is unchanged, but confidence in the processes that got there is badly shaken.

This is a big problem for advocates of political action on climate change. The case has always rested on a balance of risk. Few hypotheses in a system as complex as Earth's climate can be asserted with 100% certainty. Yet if there is sufficient evidence that human emissions are having disastrous effects, it is worth acting because the risk associated with inaction is much greater.

But deniers deal not in the balance of risk but the exposure of uncertainty. Tiny doubts on the periphery of the case, they say, undermine the whole story, banishing the threat.

That isn't true, but it is bad science and bad politics to counter scepticism with righteous indignation. In the long run, public confidence will be inspired more by frankness about what science cannot explain.

One positive outcome from this affair might be for the scientific research community to accept that it faces technological disruption just as commercial industries have done in recent years. The refusal to publish data sets, for example, smacks of analogue reaction to the demands of the digital age. In science, as in so many other fields, widespread electronic sharing is unavoidable.

Another benefit would be more rigour in the reporting of environmental issues. Florid accounts of imminent apocalypse were always counter-productive, provoking despair more than they galvanised action.

There are many excellent reasons to effect the transition to a low-carbon economy: cleaner air, economic independence from oil-exporting states, cheaper energy and, of course, combating global warming. None of these factors has changed. The case for urgent action is undiminished.